In Defense of Denial

[Hops]

I've been mulling about denial. I often find I am muttering something true (for me) when I make wry remarks to friends. Lately I've found myself saying with great cheer: "I love denial!"

I think it's true. I do. Thinking some more, I realize: I do not love the kind of denial that makes me avoid psychological truths about myself that I must face to be a grownup. Sometimes it's hard, but I do feel good about owning my own behavior and graduating out of blame school. And, accepting psychological/personality truths about people I care for most is important to me too (though denial will kick in, especially about my daughter, when it's too hard).

But where denial is truly my friend is when I contemplate the horrors of the current world, from global warming to war and battered civil rights and hatred and genocide and starvation. I can only absorb so much of it, and then I literally grasp at denial as though I'm drowning. I have to actually pretend for a while that the world is peaceful and good, that nature is my friend, that human beings can pull out of the lemming race, etc.

So that's the thought for now...sometimes I intentionally deny what is real, lest it overwhelm me. I feel as though sometimes I don't have the survival "filters" others seem to, and that I feel anguish so deeply when I allow too much reality to enter me, that I absolutely must use denial.

Hops

[Portia]

Denial works : that's why we do it. It serves a purpose very well - stops us going barmy <barmy icon>

Depressive realism (real term) is a bummer. Some kind of denial is necessary because we cannot alter what we cannot alter.

However .....we can alter quite a bit if we put our minds to it! and if we get together with other people who have similar aims.

In Praise of Denial!!

Hey.....if you know what you're denying...is it really denial? or is it concerted ignoring? Realistic adjustment to practical living?

Doesn't matter - denial is still praise-worthy because it is a fantastic non-coping coping mechanism.

Nice one Hops. You bring joy.

[Portia]

Hops, I only reacted to the objective and the truth in your post. Then I went away and felt the feelings (as I do, eh, practising ignoring the painful feelings and thinking, I’ll go away and feel them separately…) so….

I have to actually pretend for a while that the world is peaceful and good, that nature is my friend, that human beings can pull out of the lemming race, etc.

Oh Hops. The world isn’t good or bad: the world is neutral. It’s all neutral. Nature is neither your friend or foe, black or white. It’s all grey I think. It all just IS. Will it matter if humans are here or not? No. The universe will do what it will do. We are tiny! Thank goodness! Why do we matter to us? I don’t know. Because it’s important for us, being conscious of life and death, to think that we’re important, somehow. What’s important (if anything is, and nothing is) is to live. Just live. Now. Talk, be friends, love, enjoy, feel sad, feel. And think! It is joyous!

So that's the thought for now...sometimes I intentionally deny what is real, lest it overwhelm me.
Yes and sometimes I still feel a fraud for doing it. Is that residual childhood responsibility and guilt? Possibly. I’m responsible for what happens thousands of miles away?

I feel as though sometimes I don't have the survival "filters" others seem to,
 
You don’t! But those filters filter out the good stuff, as well as the painful. Would you rather be numb or alive? Alive please!

and that I feel anguish so deeply when I allow too much reality to enter me, that I absolutely must use denial.

It’s not your problem. The whole human race is not our problem. If we can make tiny changes for what we think is the better, we can do it. We can only do what we can do, no more. Acceptance of the joy and the pain and when we feel the need to act, act. It’s all we can do!

(((((((((((((((((((((((Hops)))))))))))))))))))))

PS An old thread came to mind Hops. This reminds me of (Irvin Yalom) therapy based on existential basics: that you may treat someone’s fear of four basic truths:

1. Death: I’m going to die
2. Isolation: I’m utterly alone in my head
3. Meaningless: Life is meaningless
4. Freedom: I have the freedom to do whatever I am able to do
 
Original thread: http://www.voicelessness.com/disc3/index.php?topic=472.0

I still have loads of trouble with freedom!!!    You?

[Hopalong]

What a generous response, P!
Forgive me if mine's less so...I is knackered. (LOVE that Brit word.)

I do have trouble with freedom.
It's dizzying, I can't choose, I go fetal.

If everything is possible and I can be anyone then OMG what if I pick WRONG?

Makes it hard to commit to a path and walk it.

(((((((P)))))))))

gratefully,
Hops

[moonlight52]

Hey P and Hops ,

Denial is addictive .Gosh darn you two have me thinkin again I was trying to give that up 

I get myself out of one major denial  head trip .
How many others are out there OR in here ?   

I am pooped already
I can only give up one major denial head trip at a time.

Peeling that onion again.

Hugs,
MoonLight

[moonlight52]

p.s.


Maybe Universial trickster says you can not pick wrong.

m

[Plucky]

Hi Hops,
I am going to be very honest here. I think you are in denial about some aspects of yuor personal life, when it comes to recognising that people close you to are not all good, not good at all, and can actually be little shits through and through.  (Like your boss??????)
And, maybe what you said was key - you feel that unless you think that the world is good, evidenced by the facts you notice around you, you feel as if you are drowning.   
Dorwning in evil? In powerlessness?  Losing that battle against the bad side, Superhoppy?  What if the world is neutral as P said?   Does that give you permission to stop running saving things and just be you?
Plucky 

[Hopalong]

Plucky.

Wow. That is one of the most profound things I've ever been asked.
And most penetrating.

Thank you for paying such close attention to who I am, or might be.
What a gift to have someone perceive so much...

I have to think about this.

Top of my head, yes. You're very perceptive.
It is excruciating for me to hold the thought, "People are not good."

I turn it around. La la la...it may be more denial.
And sometimes I think I DO need to stop.

It's probably fear-based.

I don't need to flip and run around calling everybody bad to fix it, I think...
but you sure nailed my assignment when you say

stop running saving things and just be you

I LIKE saving things. But it sure is tiring. 

love to you Plucky,
Hops

[Hopalong]

  Moon...

I get myself out of one major denial  head trip .
How many others are out there OR in here ? 

...just enough to keep you interested. And you've done the hard one.

A nice onion is shaped just like a moon.

Do you know in Appalachian Kentucky (I worked at an orphanage there once...remote "hollers") there are folk who call onions, ingrens? Some fascinating remnants of a dialogue they brought over from the British Isles...

Wow. I love language.

Hops

 

[Portia]

Moon!

Maybe Universial trickster says you can not pick wrong.

Yes

Hops

Who said? :

"People are not good."

It’s not true! No. It's not!

People are people are people are people are people……..

Not good. Not bad. Human. Good acts, bad acts sometimes but people are not wholly good or bad....skippety skip skippy....tum-te-tum...


..ingrens??? <total nonplussed icon>

[Hopalong]

Hi Jac,
Thanks a lot for the Wheelis quotes...very inspiring and perceptive.
Tell you the truth, they ring more clearly for me without the bracketed additions of denial...because I think he was doing his root work specifically about his internalization of his father's voice. I think he was in a grand battle with something very personal, a shadowy imprinted self that was not his, but his father's.

But yes I do fear my own anger. I fear everyone's. I look within and look without and with occasional exceptions (like me writing the truth in my own work evaluation, "speaking truth to power", or like what I did in reading deeply personal poetry or semons in public...

Other than those sorts of outlets, for which I use my main/only gift...I don't find enormous healing value in expressing anger. I've always felt this way, for as long as I can remember.

It takes a mighty wisdom to know the difference between anger used to defend voice, and anger used to swell the self (which so often hurts others). To me, it's such a slippery edge. Being on the receiving end of so much anger, learning about things like the Holocaust...kind of took care of my inner questions about anger 50 years ago.

I know what it feels like to be yelled at, mocked, scorned, exploded at. Why would I want to do that?

I can understand why someone saying, denial is my friend (did you see that I distinguished between unhelpful denial that I don't embrace, and denial that feels like protection?) -- would inflame you Jac.

It's partly personality. I just don't do rage very often, and when I have, I've been sorry. It doesn't feel cleansing, it feels sickening. So yes, I would much rather transform it into something else.

All that (defensively) said, I know I read your post with one eye shut. It was challenging. So I need time to re-read, absorb it some more. I'll do that.

Thanks for reaching out, Jac.

Hops

[Hopalong]

I'm angry about this:
(though in truth it's such a discouraging wall of words...the language oblivion of the media, which is really our only hope of raising the awareness of huge populations...that my feeling's closer to despair):

Don’t Say Tragedy, Call Selfish, Cowardly Hate Crimes What They Are

The news readers keep saying that the murders of Naomi Rose Eversole, Marian Fisher, Lina Miller, Mary Liz Miller, and Anna Mae Stoltzfus, and the attempted murder of other, still endangered girls is a tragedy. It isn’t a tragedy. Tragedies are not planned in detail, they are not planned with everything including toilet paper for the comfort of the murderer taken into an Amish school from which adults and males are released before the murderer begins to carry out his plans. This was a hate crime planned and committed by a man who felt he was entitled to murder little girls he didn’t know. He felt that his gender entitled him to terrorize, humiliate and murder them.

This wasn’t a tragedy, this wasn’t a story set into motion for the entertainment or revenge of the gods, this was one man who believed his being born with a penis gave him the power of life and death over these girls. Maybe over all girls. He could have chosen any girls to murder. This man choosing to murder girls from what he would certainly have known was a pacifist sect is everything anyone needs to know about his sense of entitlement and his cowardice. His name and identity are useless except as a study in that particular type of cowardly, selfish man. After what there is to know about him has been collected and studied he deserves to be erased from the collective memory of the world.

Lynchings are not tragedies, they are crimes, sordid murders by self-centered cowards who believe that their gender, race, religion, ethnicity or class entitles them to murder other people. Knowing the murderers for what they are is all anyone needs to know about them. Using that knowledge of their taste in entertainment, their hobbies, their upbringing and their other pathologies in order to avoid producing more of these defective human beings is all that they are good for. None of this should be anything but a scientific study in pathology.

Dwelling on the names and lives of these cowards risks turning them into something they aren’t. While studying their psychological flaws the fact that they were selfish and cowardly should never be forgotten. People with mental illness can sometimes be selfish slime too. Normal people might see them memorialized on TV as examples of evil, potential killers will see them as heros to be emulated or topped. Ignoring that possibility even as the programs talk about the “copy-cat” nature of a lot of these crimes is a crime in itself. It is the same crime the neighbors of Kitty Genovese committed when they ignored her as she was being murdered. It is cynical indifference. It is time to put an end to sensation murder used as profit driven entertainment and entertainment posing as news. It is part of the problem in the age of TV and video.

Call these crimes what they are. Don’t memorialize the criminals. Don’t instruct their admirers and fellow degenerates.

from: http://awomanwaslynchedtoday.blogspot.com/

(Also just watched Anderson Cooper's heartbreaking documentary of what's going on in Congo and Sudan for several hours. He gets it, bless his brave obsessed heart. He zeroed in on the rape of women and girls and near-infants as a war crime...) Why does this not receive constant outrage? Why does our media preoccupy itself with the murders of "pretty" young women and not concern itself with the UBIQUITY of femicide?

I am not in denial about the pain of the world, that's for sure, Jac.

Maybe I deny the pain of some things in my own life because it just seems sort of irrelevant.

(Somebody, I forget...asked if I feel responsible for the suffering of the world. I didn't want to answer but it's yes. I feel I was raised, religiously, to feel I AM my sister's and brother's keeper. And I don't do enough to help. I just yak.)

love,
Hops

[Plucky]

(Somebody, I forget...asked if I feel responsible for the suffering of the world. I didn't want to answer but it's yes. I feel I was raised, religiously, to feel I AM my sister's and brother's keeper. And I don't do enough to help. I just yak.)

Hi Hoppy,
Somewhere I read that children in dysfunctional households learn that they are responsible for way too much.   Or have no control over anything, and therefore seek control as adults so as not to relive this chaotic, unpleasant powerlessness again.  Maybe your FOO is once again fooling with you.

Also, some think that God cannot possibly exist if such evil exists in the world.  In fact, the idea that evil does exist and thrive is a concept most religious people have to struggle with accepting.
Plucky

[moonlight52]

Hi ,

This is a planet of freewill the "evil" we perceive is done by mankind.

God is not to blame for the choices of man.Freewill llets there be a  choice to choose God or not.

moon

[Hopalong]

Hi Jac,
Wheelis did speak to me, he did...it's just so intense that I listened with one ear.
I really appreciate all your efforts to be sure I'm fully awake, Jac.

I don't mean to "throw back" your concern or let it bounce off. I do self-examination too.

I just have a sense of what will overload me, or not. Just now, I'm kind of in survival mode, and periods of various degrees of denial may be part of that. I do think it's okay to use a coping mechanism when you can't handle more.

(I'm not in denial about the pain of the world, but what I mean is I can't contemplate it 24/7 and must sometimes retreat into fantasy. That's okay. Fantasy is necessary to me too...)

I don't necessarily think it's a permanent worldview, but I was musing about it.

thanks for your thinking,
Hops